voi CesVoice also connotes the vocabulary being employed and, by implication, the critical
location of the researcher. Thus a Feminist voice or a marxist voice will deploy certain
terms and will not deploy others. one of the cues to a critical position is the vocabulary
being deployed to describe it. of course the voice of arts research speaks through
artefacts and not only through verbal language or written texts and it is common to
hear the expression ‘the language of art’. it may be that the content that art expresses
through the language of art is different from the content of thought (as addressed in the
philosophy of language) and instead expresses, for example, what can be experienced.
it is perhaps no accident that the outcomes of artistic research are not in verbal or
written language. Researchers in other subjects have developed quite specialized forms
of linguistic expression in order to be as clear and unambiguous as possible regarding
the outcomes of their research. This belongs to the idealized aim of traditional research
to discover or contribute something quite specific to the current body of knowledge in
order to increase it in an identifiable way. But the generally constructivist tendency of
arts research has an entirely different idealized aim. owing to the interest of, and value
placed in, the individual’s interpretation of experience and the world, arts research
engages with pluralistic interpretation. in our view, the multiplicity of interpretations
arising from activities in the arts is an asset and not a drawback. This is because both
arts and humanities subjects are able to sustain numerous diverse interpretations
simultaneously, without feeling the need to prioritize one over another. accordingly,
non-linguistic outputs – that facilitate an even greater plurality of interpretation of
their meaning and significance than textual ones – are appropriate in such a context.
however, there is perhaps a need to clarify the relationship of the infinite pluralism
within the arts to the seemingly singular determinism of scientific and academic
research.
in part ii of this book we hear both the discussion of which voice to use, as well as
the expression of issues using particular voices. nevertheless, part ii as a whole shows
an interest in the potential available to artistic researchers through their choice of
artistic, instead of linguistic, media. The prospect that artistic research may address
content that is inexpressible through other media is a radical one. There are, however,
a number of indicators that this might indeed be the case. For example, art historical or
art critical accounts of what the arts are doing often reveal great insight on the part of
the artist, but only fractionally account for the impact of an artwork. Knowing what an
artwork means, namely its meaning for a particular, usually specialist audience, is only
part of the account. artworks normally have aesthetic merit as well as meaning; they
have social and economic functions, etc. What these partial accounts may be showing
is that single-focus accounts fail to capture the pluralism of artistic outcomes, and that
pluralism has something to say about the artistic concept of the world. as we have
seen, the arts encourage pluralism but academic research traditionally does not. This
may indicate something about the weakness of non-pluralistic conceptual frameworks
rather than a weakness of artistic research, resulting in a role for artistic research to
contribute to a revision of the academic concept of knowledge.